This EVE Online
Dev Blog has more on CCP's efforts at curbing real-money transactions in
EVE Online, their sci-fi MMORPG, describing a campaign against RMT they've
dubbed "Unholy Rage." As part of this effort, they recently banned over 6200
paying accounts in one shot, and the post goes into what the culprits were doing
and how they were caught. Thanks
Massively.

If game companies really want to deal with this, design games w/o player->player transactions. Because otherwise real-world cash for in-game items is inevitable.

That sounds like a horrible idea. I'm not sure if you're thinking only of currency transactions but if you really wanted to deal with this you'd have to disable any item sharing/selling as well. Because if currency wasn't able to be traded they'd just trade in items, or resources, or something that players wanted. Disabling all of that would take a major portion of most MMO's out of the game, the in game economy.

CCP is taking the right approach to this. Allowing players to buy these game time codes internally gives players on the outside a way to use their real world cash to buy in game currency by selling these 1 time use disposable items that other players obviously want. Most players aren't going to buy these game time codes every month, and if they do the price will go up and it will become a self correcting problem. At worst it means there will be more players in the game more often which is better for everyone.

It's the best solution all things considered. People who want to buy isk. So CCP sells an item that has great value on the internal game market. Other players not wanting to spend money see a greater reason to spend time inside the game playing, in order to buy these items. No gold farmers, no ebay bullshit, no scams. Just a simple elegant solution.

What this guy said over on the comments page on massively. Pretty much sums up ccp and my personal dealings with them over the years.

"While I would like to share your viewpoint and respect CCP for banning paying customers in order to stick to their principles, the reality is that they stand to make MORE money by banning people that engage in RMT, and I can guarantee you that they've crunched the numbers on this and aren't doing it out of a sense of altruism, fairness, or 'doing the right thing.' They are a business, and their goal is make money, period. They may say they're doing it to help legitimate players, and you may believe them, but hey that's the value of good PR and a slick-talking marketing department I guess."

CCP never have or never will do anything for the greater good beyond the value of the dollar.

Money, or ISK can only buy you so much in EVE. It cant really upgrade your character. You cant "speed" train your skills. All you can really do with it is buy better ships or equipment. Which is kind of pointless if you dont have the skills to use them...

Considering they spent 5 years+ working on a solution that would make their customer base happy and still screw over the gold farmers, I don't know where you get the impression that they were "surprised."

The point is that in-game anything goes. But when you start using your out-of-game resources to make yourself better (like your money) than everyone else then they may as well make sure that money gets channeled back into the game where it benefits everyone in the long run. Seeing the big picture means looking beyond what it does for you directly.

I still find it rather funny that it's okay to fuck over CCP's customers pretty much any way you like...but don't you dare try to make any money from their -game-. Personally, I'd expect that any game developers that pick the griefer crowd as their preferred customers would inherently have a lot of players who also don't much care how the devs want them to behave. But for some reason, they always seem to be so surprised about it...

"We can do this one of two ways. There's the hard way, which involves hours of discussion, tons of negotiation, half a dozen bribes, and no guarantee of success.""What's the easy way?""Liberally placed high explosives."